{"id":"01KG8AKFKT80GPVFS43B6H49MG","cid":"bafkreiasxbzop7nd4tuhmfb3ev4pnoytntqobkkf3ywugh4la652jksl7q","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":7119,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 2","source_file":"01KG89J1DKC9HHJRKY25JZBEXW","start_line":7067,"text":"touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered with\r\nebon mud—ebon mud that stuck like Jews’ pitch. At times the mass,\r\nreceiving some mysterious impulse far in the rear, away among the\r\ncoiled thoroughfares out of sight, would, start forward with a\r\nspasmodic surge. It seemed as if some squadron of centaurs, on the\r\nthither side of Phlegethon, with charge on charge, was driving\r\ntormented humanity, with all its chattels, across.\r\n\r\nWhichever way the eye turned, no tree, no speck of any green thing was\r\nseen—no more than in smithies. All laborers, of whatsoever sort, were\r\nhued like the men in foundries. The black vistas of streets were as the\r\ngalleries in coal mines; the flagging, as flat tomb-stones, minus the\r\nconsecration of moss, and worn heavily down, by sorrowful tramping, as\r\nthe vitreous rocks in the cursed Gallipagos, over which the convict\r\ntortoises crawl.\r\n\r\nAs in eclipses, the sun was hidden; the air darkened; the whole dull,\r\ndismayed aspect of things, as if some neighboring volcano, belching its\r\npremonitory smoke, were about to whelm the great town, as Herculaneum\r\nand Pompeii, or the Cities of the Plain. And as they had been upturned\r\nin terror towards the mountain, all faces were more or less snowed or\r\nspotted with soot. Nor marble, nor flesh, nor the sad spirit of man,\r\nmay in this cindery City of Dis abide white.\r\n\r\nAs retired at length, midway, in a recess of the bridge, Israel\r\nsurveyed them, various individual aspects all but frighted him. Knowing\r\nnot who they were; never destined, it may be, to behold them again; one\r\nafter the other, they drifted by, uninvoked ghosts in Hades. Some of\r\nthe wayfarers wore a less serious look; some seemed hysterically merry;\r\nbut the mournful faces had an earnestness not seen in the others:\r\nbecause man, “poor player,” succeeds better in life’s tragedy than\r\ncomedy.\r\n\r\nArrived, in the end, on the Middlesex side, Israel’s heart was\r\nprophetically heavy; foreknowing, that being of this race, felicity\r\ncould never be his lot.\r\n\r\nFor five days he wandered and wandered. Without leaving statelier\r\nhaunts unvisited, he did not overlook those broader areas—hereditary\r\nparks and manors of vice and misery. Not by constitution disposed to\r\ngloom, there was a mysteriousness in those impulses which led him at\r\nthis time to rovings like these. But hereby stoic influences were at\r\nwork, to fit him at a soon-coming day for enacting a part in the last\r\nextremities here seen; when by sickness, destitution, each busy ill of\r\nexile, he was destined to experience a fate, uncommon even to luckless\r\nhumanity—a fate whose crowning qualities were its remoteness from\r\nrelief and its depth of obscurity—London, adversity, and the sea, three\r\nArmageddons, which, at one and the same time, slay and secrete their\r\nvictims.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 2"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG8AJJRWBE8SV99PER96J4GW","peer_type":"chapter","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG89J1DKC9HHJRKY25JZBEXW","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG89HMDZKNY753EZE1CJ8HZW","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG8AKFKTRN00Z7743SVCB3R3","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T20:48:05.754Z","ts":"2026-01-30T20:48:18.621Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}